<?php
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 * Copyright © 2019 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'No agency',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/03/16.jpg" alt="Random junk beside the bike path" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="dreams">
	<h2>Dream journal</h2>
	<p>
		I dreamed my mother and I were getting along.
		People kept coming into our home though, and every time they did, we hid.
		They left without bothering us though, and we&apos;d resume what we were doing.
		The final time we dropped down behind some stuff, and a spider dropped down from the ceiling, dangling a few centimetres up from the table we&apos;d been at.
		My mother pointed out the spider.
		I felt someone push me down from behind, and my mother asked &quot;What do you mean?&quot;.
		I looked up and found an older lady had stabbed her in the back using one of her best kitchen knives with one hand and was shoving me down with the other.
		She said my mother&apos;s life depended on how quickly I could drive her to the hospital.
		I tried to get the knife out of her hand.
		It was no use trying to drag my mother out of there if she was still armed and still a threat.
		Surprisingly, she just let go of the knife.
		So I plunged the knife into the assailant&apos;s heart.
		At that point, I awoke with a very heavy feeling throughout my entire body.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="religion">
	<h2>Religion</h2>
	<p>
		They missionaries never responded via email, so I wasn&apos;t sure my message had even gotten through to them.
		I asked when they came over today though, and it had.
		One of them gave me permission to quote them, the other said nothing.
	</p>
	<p>
		They also ended up not covering the structure of the church and the titles associated with various positions.
		Darn.
		Maybe next time.
	</p>
	<p>
		They had me watch a video on free will produced by their church.
		I love it when their own media brings up points I&apos;ve been making the whole time.
		The video explained that in order to have agency, you needed four things: the power to choose, the law of right and wrong, knowledge, and opposition.
		In the past, they&apos;ve said that if Jesus and/or Elohim were to reveal themselves, we wouldn&apos;t have agency because we would no longer have the power to choose.
		We could still choose to disobey though.
		And in fact, we can only make that choice if we have knowledge of their existence.
		Without such knowledge, we don&apos;t know there&apos;s anyone there to disobey.
		The fact that they don&apos;t reveal themselves doesn&apos;t preserve our agency; it eliminates it.
		I may not have had quite the words to express it in a way the missionaries understood, but I&apos;ve kept saying that withough knowledge, you can&apos;t make informed decisions, so by withholding knowledge, you take away the freedom to choose.
		I think I got them to understand though when I turned what the video said back on them.
		They claimed that we do have the knowledge through the scriptures, but I pointed out that there are a multitude of religions with scriptures, and none of these sets of scriptures are particularly distinguishable from the rest when it comes to knowing whether they&apos;re divinely inspired.
		They fell back to that you have to ask the Holy Ghost, but again, if the Holy Ghost can&apos;t be distinguished from gut feelings, he&apos;s not a reliable witness.
		You can think you&apos;ve gotten information from him when you really haven&apos;t.
	</p>
	<p>
		Speaking of the Holy Ghost, it seems he&apos;s a &quot;he&quot;, not an it.
		However, as far as we know, he has no name.
		If he&apos;s so important, it seems like he deserves a name and be called by it, but I guess none of the prophets have thought to ask.
		Anyway, they went over again how the spirit talks to everyone differently, but this time, with a very strange example.
		There was someone that composed music and tried for ten years to get an answer to prayer.
		Finally, after this decade, they noticed that the spirit had given them their answer in the music they&apos;d just composed.
		They weren&apos;t looking for answers there in their own works; they hadn&apos;t even considered the answer might be there.
		So having found their answer, they went back and looked at their old works.
		It turned out they Holy Ghost had been answering their prayers all along, but they just hadn&apos;t noticed.
		So what&apos;s the takeaway?
		Basically, the claim that the Holy Spirit will talk to you in the language you need him to in order to understand him doesn&apos;t hold water.
		He&apos;ll speak to some in very obscure ways that you might not catch for a decade.
		Wow.
		So much for speaking to people in the way they need to hear.
	</p>
	<p>
		The missionaries showed me a passage from one of their other holy books; I think it was the Doctrines and Covenants.
		It was a message from Elohim, saying that his purpose was to bring us immortality and everlasting life.
		The missionaries said they&apos;d cover what the difference between the two is at a later time.
		But anyway, to bring us immortality and everlasting life, or to bring us anything at all, for that matter, we had to exist.
		So that&apos;d be why he created us: it was his purpose.
		But if he&apos;s got a purpose like that, it means he&apos;s no less a pawn than we are.
		There&apos;s someone higher up the chain.
		Understanding Elohim and his goals for us requires understanding Elohim&apos;s creator and their goals for us and for Elohim.
		It does sound like Elohim is a created being though.
		How far does the stack of turtles go?
		Where did the Original One come from?
	</p>
	<p>
		While I was at work, a couple more things occurred to me.
		First, one of the missionaries had mentioned several names of Jesus.
		They&apos;d told me before that Jehovah was Jesus, and I knew that outside their church, Jehovah is Yahweh.
		I wasn&apos;t quite sure that Jehovah was Yahweh within this church though.
		Though not their intent, they confirmed that Yahweh is yet another name of this same being.
		Perfect.
		I no longer have to wonder.
	</p>
	<p>
		Next, the scriptures tell us that &quot;God&quot; can&apos;t lie.
		<strong>*Which*</strong> god can&apos;t lie though?
		It seems that both Jesus and Elohim are referred to as &quot;God&quot; in different contexts.
		It makes a difference which one has this limitation.
		Supposedly, we&apos;re supposed to use Jesus as an example to try to be like Elohim.
		Also, Jesus was supposed to have been in the same position as us, able to sin, but unlike us, never faltering.
		Becoming like Elohim requires us to have agency, because Elohim himself has agency.
		If it&apos;s Elohim that can&apos;t lie, one of two things is the case.
		Either we don&apos;t have to be able to lie to have agency, which means that there&apos;s no excuse for him to have created us with the capacity to lie, or Elohim lacks agency, which means we don&apos;t need agency to be like him.
		In fact, because he has an inability to lie, we too need to be unable to lie if we are to be like him.
		The fact that we were created with the ability to lie means we&apos;re unable to be like him.
		On the other hand, if it&apos;s Jesus that can&apos;t lie, it means that Jesus wasn&apos;t put in the same situation as us.
		He lived better than us not because he <strong>*is*</strong> better than us, but instead because he lacked agency.
		Either way, either being unable to lie means you don&apos;t have agency, or there was no reason to give us the capacity to lie because the capacity to lie isn&apos;t a part of agency.
		Or, there&apos;s actually another option, which is that the god claiming to be unable to lie is actually lying about being unable to lie.
	</p>
	<p>
		Another church left a flier on my door, but the address on the flier is off in another state.
		I&apos;ve got to wonder why they&apos;re leaving a flier on someone&apos;s door this far out.
		They don&apos;t actually expect people to travel that far to attend a church service, do they?
		I&apos;ve written to them asking what&apos;s up, but I&apos;m only half expecting to even hear an answer back.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			That popular articles module seems like a good tool for determining what sort of content your audience wants to see from you.
		</p>
		<p>
			On that stats module, in what way does it track users?
			Do you mean it&apos;s telling you how many there are, or do you mean it&apos;s recording what pages they look at so you can build a creepy profile of them?
			There are so many options in between, too.
		</p>
		<p>
			The archive module sounds cool.
			I especially like the calendar feature you described.
			It reminds me of the calendar I use for my journal.
			The index page is a set of $a[ASCII] calendars with clickable dates, linked to the journal entry page written on and about that day.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
END
);
